FutureClean Assured Systems, often employed as an expert in the naval and civilian marine industry, and also a consultant to the Royal Navy and Ministry of Defence, shared some of its marine and ship husbandry expertise more widely recently, with a group of Indian marine industry experts and executives out in Mumbai.

The company's representative, Rafael Cobos, gave an hour long presentation to the group who were involved in shipping, cruise ship operation, oil exploration and onshore services, based on the company's work with the MoD and other extensive marine work.

The presentation: 'Ship Husbandry: Towards a Unified Operations Manual', went into detail about the process of problem solving, auditing and reviewing, and then assessing the needs of any vessel (commercial ship, an oil-rig or cruise ship) to create a unified and optimised ship husbandry operations manual.

An operations manual encompasses all aspects of cleaning and hygiene throughout all areas of a vessel, including training, cleaning standards, product and equipment specifications.

The presentation highlighted many common cleaning and hygiene problems encountered, such as: time and manning pressures, corrosion, the impact of ship design to ship systems and ineffective training.

A ship has many interconnecting systems, so, seemingly simple problems, for example using the 'wrong' cleaning product without realising the effect it can have, can have a significant effect on pipework, sewage treatment systems and any other systems downstream.

Another problem highlighted was the impact ship design has on cleaning. Ship design can have a major impact on 'cleanability', whether it's the layout or the surface materials used, so the cleaning systems and training employed must adapt to this working environment.

During the question and answer session, the common theme to the questions posed was the lack of standardised cleaning standards, and any form of quality control within their current operations manuals. Also noted was the sheer lack of detail within the manuals. Practically all operations manuals do not specify the equipment and product to be used, and rely only on the briefest of descriptions... this will produce varying levels of quality and there is no guarantee on the safety of the person or on the ship.

Rafael's concluding remarks helped cement the practical aspects of a successful operations manual: "By establishing these suites of standards optimised for the vessel (vessel design, surface materials, compartment types, expected final appearance, etc), with the right products and equipment to match, significant time and cost savings can be made, not to mention reduced downtime in ship systems downstream and reduced damage to surface materials," he said, explaining that the intention of the talk was to provide a valuable insight into how to solve these common problems and the many advantages of ship staff working and being trained using one single optimised operations manual.

"It was specifically designed to raise cleaning and hygiene standards throughout the ship to the highest levels possible, and to do that as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible," he said.